Acevedo, Chantel

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Acevedo, Chantel

PERSONAL: Born in Hialeah, FL; married Orlando Acevedo (a chemist). Education: University of Miami, A.B., M.F.A., both 1997.

ADDRESSES: Home—Hamden, CT. Office—St. Margaret's-McTernan School, Chase Collegiate School, 565 Chase Parkway, Waterbury, CT 06708. Agent—Judith Weber, Sobel-Weber Associates, Inc., 146 E. 19th St., New York, NY 10003. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer and educator. St. Margaret's-McTernan School, Chase Collegiate School, Waterbury, CT, English teacher and dean of students.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fred Shaw Fiction Prize, 1998, and Pushcart Prize nomination, both for "Blue Exile"; Fulbright Memorial Fund grant, 2001; Fulbright Hays grant, 2004.

WRITINGS:

Love and Ghost Letters (novel), St. Martin's (New York, NY), 2005.

Also author of short stories and poems, including "Blue Exile," "The Tourist's Gift," "The Storyteller and the Little Revolution," "The Longest Walk," and "A Love That Hurts."

SIDELIGHTS: Chantel Acevedo is the daughter of two Cuban-American immigrants and Acevedo grew up in Miami, Florida, in the midst of a large extended family of Cuban exiles. Cuban culture and nostalgia pervaded her childhood and her grandmother told her stories of family members left behind. This consciousness, based on a Cuba that she can imagine but has never seen in person, pervades Acevedo's fiction, which she has been publishing since the late 1990s. Her novel Love and Ghost Letters tells the story of Josefina, a young woman from a wealthy family in pre-Castro Cuba. Captivated by a romantic but poor man, she marries him and leaves her comfortable home for a poverty-stricken village. Although she comes to believe that her father is dead, he has actually immigrated to Miami; now he begins sending her letters and money that are delivered by her village butcher. Josefina believes the letters are from heaven and falls in love with the man who delivers them.

Acevedo's debut novel was fairly well received by critics, and a Kirkus Reviews contributor called Love and Ghost Letters a "multigenerational story of life and love in Cuba." However, some reviewers complained that the story lacked a real sense of the details of Cuban life and deemed it unfocused. Marjorie Kehe, reviewing the book for the Christian Science Monitor, wrote that "Acevedo is a fine storyteller and although her tale ultimately bogs down, it unfolds with a leisurely pleasure that feels like magical realism."